"I love the atmosphere and the way people are treated here," says Parker Pawlusiak of Northville, who was an intern last summer and is waiting for his interview for a full-time job at Quicken Loans headquarters in Detroit on Oct. 24. Quicken Loans is one of the Detroit Free Press Top Workplaces for 2012. For more on large workplace winners, see 4E and 6E . / ROMAIN BLANQUART/ Detroit Free Press

For some Michigan employers, the annual Detroit Free Press Top Workplaces survey, now in its fifth year, is a feather in the company cap.

A badge of honor.

It can be a recruiting tool for top-ranking companies, providing empirical evidence that they are great places to work.

For Mark Petroff, president and CEO of Detroit-based Marketing Associates, it's something more.

"We've used the employee engagement surveys as a roadmap to change," says Petroff, who began entering the Top Workplaces derby each year after moving his firm downtown in late 2007 from Bloomfield Hills. This is the first year Marketing Associates has cracked the top 35 list in the midsize category.

"I was so happy we made the list this year," Petroff says, after four years of having his people participate.

"You like to think you're a visionary as the CEO," adds the U.S. Naval Academy graduate and University of Michigan MBA, "but it's the people in the trenches doing the work, they know what's really going on and what needs to be done."

Marketing Associates, a private firm owned by an investor group led by Edsel Ford II, provides a range of interactive marketing services, from e-mail blasts to archiving digital video assets and helping manage online contests and rewards programs.

Since moving to office space in Campus Martius, the firm has grown from 135 employees to 210 and diversified its client base from 93% automotive -- predominantly Ford -- to 57% non-Ford and a balanced mix of auto and non-auto business.

Petroff says he's elated to be in downtown Detroit today, noting that he and his team have built strong relations with people from neighboring firms such as Compuware, Walbridge and Quicken Loans -- something that didn't happen at a more isolated suburban location.

But employees weren't so hot on the downtown move at first. In fact, Petroff has told me, it went over at first like a "lead balloon," especially among employees commuting from northern Oakland County.

What the Top Workplaces survey in the first few years after the move told Petroff was that his people were hungry for more information about the company's strategy. "They wanted to know 'What's Mark doing, who's Mark meeting with?' That informs them about the company's strategy and direction. We started holding more employee town-hall meetings," Petroff says.

A hot-button survey response from workers at almost all employers, including Marketing Associates, is a strong desire to know that their job is part of something meaningful. Petroff says community involvement activities have multiplied since the move downtown, with lots of participation in United Way, Habitat for Humanity, Gleaners food bank and other activities.

The Marketing Associates experience with the Top Workplaces survey echoes one that Peter Wilde, recently retired managing director of the Townsend Hotel in Birmingham, told me about back in 2009.

As his high-end hotel was struggling through the trauma of the 2008-09 economic crisis, Wilde had cut room rates, staff and employee pay -- and he wanted to know how his people were holding up. Townsend front-line employees had taken 5% pay cuts, while managers took 10% reductions and Wilde himself took a 15% hit.

"I knew our people would be painfully honest," he told me then. The Townsend didn't make the top tier of Top Workplaces awards that year, but was honored in the same midsize category that Marketing Associates cracked this year.